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Except Ireland didn’t exactly have a history of goodwill, serenity and balance. I frowned at the screaming stone like that was its fault, but Lugh brushed the thought away with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Here lies the heart of our civilization. The collected spirit of the aos sí, where at midsummer those who would rule pass through the hall and come to the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. The stone cries out for all of Ireland to hear when a worthy man lays hand on it. The Morrígan comes to wed him, and we kneel before our new king.”
“You get a lot of people eager for that job when they know the wedding bed ends up with a sacrificial knife through it?” My analogy sucked, but Lugh got the point. So to speak.
“It is an honor and a duty to be tested,” he said stiffly, and just to teach me a lesson, struck off across the hills while he spoke. I chased after as he replaced stiffness with haughtiness that I was sure covered uncertainty. “All creatures must die. What better reason than for your people?”
Wrongness twitched up my spine again, just like it had when I’d contemplated Ireland’s emotional balance. “See, now, I get you’re elves or whatever, but if I’ve learned one thing being a shaman it’s that blood sacrifice is just not cool. It leads to all kinds of bad moj—” I broke off and glared over my shoulder at Gary, who had no problem keeping pace as we approached the Lia Fáil. He widened his eyes and mimed zipping his lips: no MojoJo from him. Satisfied, I finished, “Bad mojo. I can’t see that undergoing a 180-degree reversal, even over the course of a jillion years. Also,” I said, glancing around, “if there’s going to be a sacrifice here, shouldn’t there be a bloodthirsty crowd gathering?”
“It is a private affair,” Lugh said, still uptight and arrogant about it.
I snorted, then gaped as the penny dropped. “Oh, shit. You mean you didn’t know this would happen when you signed on, don’t you. Oh, crap. This cannot be good. This can’t be good at all. Sacrifices are bad enough. Secret sacrifices, that, no, just no. I put my foot down. That’s enough of this bullshit. Where is she? I’m going to have a word with this chick.”
Lugh, wordlessly, pointed skyward. I whipped around, arms akimbo.
The woman who stalked out of the sky was my mother.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t really, not after a second shocked look. But that first one was a blow to the gut, sharp enough to make me breathless and sick. I took a woozy step backward and clung to the standing stone like an ingénue while I took stock of the Morrígan.
She was actually far more beautiful than my mother, but there was a definite similarity. More than just the long jet-black hair and light-colored eyes: they had a ferocity I didn’t think I shared. In my mother, that ferocity came out in the way she chewed Altoids.
In the Morrígan, it was more in the way she charged down out of the sky with a blazing sword in one hand and a trio of shrieking ravens flapping around her shoulders. Lugh, the damned fool, stepped between me and her and flung his arms wide, making himself an easily skewerable target.
Gary muttered, “Elves ain’t too bright,” as he lumbered by me and tackled Lugh to the ground just as the Morrígan swung her sword at him.
It slammed into the Stone of Destiny so hard that something, either the stone or the sword, should have shattered. Neither did, but the clang nearly broke me into a billion pieces. Chills dashed up my spine, down my arms, back up again and took up residence at the base of my neck, where they did a tap dance. Lugh gave a little grunt that made a nice counterbeat to the tapping. Gary rolled off him as the Morrígan squalled in pure outraged astonishment. The ravens took their distance from her and she landed on the ground in a cinematic rush of blue robes and black hair. It was very John Woo. All we needed was a flock of doves.
The Morrígan came to her feet in a surge of power and grace and began stalking toward Gary. “You dare deny me my sacrifice?”
He sat up and jerked a thumb my way. “Not me, doll. Her.”
I waved and produced my best perky smile. “Hi.”
The Morrígan gave me a dismissive look, then looked again more carefully. “You bear my lord’s mark.”
“I do?” I glanced at myself, half expecting the sign of the cross or some other inappropriately modern religious marker to have cropped up on my skin. Then I clapped my hand at my throat, where the necklace’s pendant had a quartered cross. “Oh! This?”
“No.” She flicked a finger and the sleeve of my new $1800 leather coat ripped apart to expose the bandaged werewolf bite. My vision washed out, leaving nothing in the world but my ruined sleeve. Static filled my ears, mostly drowning out her, “That. What does a sister in blood wish with my sacrifice?”
It hadn’t split on the seam. The leather was damaged. It couldn’t be fixed, and there was no earthly way I was going to get an exchange on an item damaged by supernatural beings. I lifted my gaze inch by incremental inch to fix the laserlike focus of consumer fury on the Morrígan.
Gary mumbled, “Uh-oh,” and got out of the way.
“First,” I said in the lowest, deadliest voice I had at my disposal, “fix my coat. Then we’ll discuss what I want with your sacrifice.”
To my utter astonishment, she arched an eyebrow, shrugged and flicked her finger again. My coat put itself back together, not a hint of damage done to it. The wind sailed right out of my rage and despite myself I said, “That was kind of cool. How’d you do it?”
“Will it and it is so. The Master gives us such gifts. You must be new to your mark, if you haven’t yet learned that. Now.” Her eyebrows arched again. “My sacrifice?”
“Oh yeah. You can’t have him.” I smiled at her, all pleasant resolution. Amazing what a little thing like an undamaged coat sleeve did for my humor. Then her answer began trickling toward comprehension, and cold slid down my spine. “Um. Mark of the Master? You mean your boss is the same… Shit. Shit, shit, shit shit shit.” It didn’t take very many repetitions for that to become an absurd-sounding word. I said it one more time for good measure, turned around, kicked the Stone of Destiny and turned back.
This time, though, I had a sword in my hand. My silver rapier, taken off a god and usually resident beneath my bed. It had at least two feet of reach on the Morrígan’s short sword. I hoped like hell that was enough to make up for what I suspected were her vastly superior fighting skills.
She looked wonderfully nonplussed by the new addition to my accessories. It was all I could do to not dance a jig. The blade was part of my psychic armor, so I’d been pretty sure I could pull it from halfway across the world. The Morrígan’s astonishment was just a terrific bonus. Gary gave a triumphant “Hah!”
Lugh, as astounded as the Morrígan, said, “No gwyld I know carries a sword,” and then it was on.
She was fast. God, she was fast, and had obviously been using a sword forever, whereas I’d started learning barely a year ago. Her first flurry came down like an avalanche, short blade cutting the air so quickly it made the whipping sounds children usually add to swordplay. I couldn’t see it, not even with the Sight running at full bore. Instead I watched her shoulders, her hips, her feet and somewhere at the back of my mind all the training Phoebe had pounded into me did its job. The rapier was where it needed to be time and again, preventing the Morrígan from skewering me.
My arms were already getting numb, and she’d been hitting me for only about half a minute. I hadn’t come close to an offensive measure. I was going to earn Lugh a whopping fifteen seconds of life if I didn’t do something else fast.
Do something else fast. That was the key. I whispered, Rattler? I need your gift of speed, silently, and a slithering, sibilant personality came to life within me.
We ssstrike, he agreed, but he sounded weary. As well he should: barely a day ago he’d stripped me right down to the core in order to make sure I survived getting smashed by a truck. It had taken a lot out of both of us, even if spirit animals didn’t technically have a lot to be taken out of. He was less of a sketch of light in my mind than usual, but adrenaline pumped through my veins, lending me the swiftness of a striking snake.
The Morrígan was astonished again when my rapier came up and not just blocked, but tangled and threw her short sword to the side. Not away: her loose, strong grip was too much for that, but I made an opening with the parry, and for the first time pressed the fight. She dropped back, not retreating, but distancing herself so she could get a better look at me. I’d apparently suddenly become worthy. That wasn’t exactly the accolade I wanted, but it was better than having my head handed to me. I took a step toward her, but just one. I had the screaming stone at my back and wanted to keep it there. Her mouth flattened, recognition of what I was doing, and for an instant her gaze went beyond me, to Gary and Lugh.
I knew I shouldn’t look. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. Just one quick glance over my shoulder, to make sure they were all right.
When I looked back, ravens tried to eat my face.
I shrieked, dropped my sword and flailed at the damned birds. Beaks and talons caught my hands, my hair, my arms, my cheeks, scoring vicious digs and slashes. Healing magic sluiced through me, keeping blood from spattering, but I didn’t know how to fight a flock of birds.
We ssstrike, Rattler said in audible irritation, and my left hand snapped out to seize one of the ravens by its throat.
The snaky impulse was to squeeze and crack its fragile bones. Somehow I didn’t, though I felt the play of muscle in my arm and saw it enter my hand. It stopped just before my fingers spasmed shut. The raven, with no evident concern for its mortality, twisted its head and bit the tender flesh between the thumb and forefinger.
The other two ravens beat wings backward, taking themselves just out of my range of attack. Taking themselves out of their range of attack, too, for which I was grateful. Bird in one hand, I knelt to scoop up my sword, then leveled it at the Morrígan, who once more looked astonished. And furious, but she held still, which led me to a rapid conclusion. “Your power’s tied up in the birds. What happens if one dies? You can’t fly out of here on their wings the way you just arrived, that’s for damned sure. Quite a letdown to walk where you once flew, eh? What else, Morrígan? What else do you lose if you lose a bird?”
Truth was, I hadn’t stopped myself from killing the raven because I thought it might be a bargaining chip. I hadn’t killed it because Raven was my other spirit animal, and I thought he might take issue with me obliterating one of his brethren. But the Morrígan didn’t have to know that. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Right up until she snarled, “Less than if I lose the sacrifice,” and with another twitch of her fingers, broke the bird’s neck.
Don’t ever try to tell me animals don’t mourn. The remaining ravens made god-awful sounds, noises that I would call shrieks of horror in humans, and renewed their attack. On me, not on the damned Morrígan, even though she was the actual criminal here. I dropped the dead raven and swung wide with my rapier, cutting an errant feather as it fell. For half a breath I was impressed with the sword’s sharpness, and then I was back to facing three opponents as the Morrígan took the fight to me again.
Rattler’s power surged through me, lending me the speed to meet hers. I already had the strength, thanks to having spent most of a lifetime working on cars. I did not, however, have a duo of infuriated ravens on my side, and the birds were rapidly tipping the odds in her favor. I blurted, “Raven?” out loud and a pleased kak kak KAK! ricocheted through my mind as Raven exploded from the back of my head.
That’s what it felt like, anyway, and from the Morrígan’s expression that might have been what it looked like. Unlike Rattler, Raven wasn’t worn to a nub. Just the opposite, in fact. He hadn’t scraped me off a highway after I’d been hit by a truck, but he had partaken in the following spirit dance. It had brought Rattler and me from exhausted to functioning, and had taken the already-lively spirit bird from functioning to exuberant. This was his first chance since then to burn off some of that energy. He came swinging around my head in a sparkling display of brilliance and smacked the nearest normal raven with his wing.
Nominally normal, anyway. I wasn’t sure how normal any bird that helped fly a full-grown woman through the sky was, but it was black and glossy and looked like it belonged to the real world, whereas my Raven was made of fireworks. My Raven was also about two and a half feet long with a nearly five-foot wingspan, which made him gigantic in raven terms. The Morrígan’s were merely ordinary in comparison.
And they were totally unprepared to be buffeted by those great long wings. He’d hit me with them any number of times. It hurt. Apparently the Morrígan’s raven thought so, too, because it squawked in outrage and left off whacking me to claw at Raven. He did a lovely wing-tip pivot practically on top of my head and crashed into the other raven, then shot skyward with two black streaks of cawing anger chasing him. I said, “Thank you!” and got down to the serious business of having my ass handed to me.
I mean, really. I had strength, I had speed, but not in a hundred years would I have skill like the Morrígan’s. Hell, she even looked tougher than me, though I had a brief vision of how Gary probably saw us—her decked out in blue robes with long flying black hair, me with my short-cropped ’do and flowing white leather coat—and I decided we probably both looked pretty badass. Her more than me, though, because she was obviously the one taking her opponent apart bit by bit with her swordplay.
I parried like hell and tried every trick Phoebe’d taught me, plus a few I’d made up myself. I ducked. I jumped. I threw grass in her face. I kicked and almost got my foot cut off for my troubles. My left forearm throbbed worse with every passing moment, and the Morrígan smiled every time I fumbled on that side, like she knew exactly where my weakness was and only had to wait for me to give in.
Well, I was nothing if not stubborn. I might be bleeding, cursed with a dark mark and about to turn into a werewolf, but I wasn’t going to give the beautiful bitch the satisfaction of my failure. I retreated until I had the Stone of Destiny against my spine. Lugh and Gary weren’t there anymore, which I hoped was good.
What I really wanted was a minute to stop and think. What I got was a merry chase around the Stone, which was small enough to hug and therefore not really much use as an object to hide behind. Still, I ran around it, the Morrígan on my heels, while I tried to put it all together. It was obvious Lugh was fundamentally wrong about his Ireland being a place of balance and peace if the Morrígan recognized a werewolf bite as her master’s mark. I’d watched the werewolves being birthed from the mouth of a black hellhole. I knew their master, at least in passing. He was not one of the good guys.
In fact, he’d been trying to kill me since before I was born. My mother had thwarted him and sent me to America to keep me safe, but I’d regained his attention when my shamanic powers reawakened last year. If the Morrígan, mistress of death and war and doom, was under his command, then—
Then I tripped on the toes of my stompy boots, which were not meant for running circles in, and did a nosedive into the soft earth of ancient Tara.
Lugh, the goddamned fool, came up out of nowhere and took the blow that would have ended my life.
Chapter Six
Blood spattered me, the Stone, the green grass, everything, but I couldn’t even cry out. My voice was lodged in my throat, held there by horror. The Morrígan howled a mixture of delight and anger. She’d gotten her sacrifice, if not her target. Lugh slid off her sword and dropped to the earth. For an instant even the ravens ceased fighting and we all stared at the king’s prone form.
Then he dragged a shallow, shuddering breath, and hope seared me. I jammed my rapier upward, scoring the first blood I’d actually taken from the Morrígan, but not doing enough damage to take her down for the count. She shrieked and whirled, sword lifted to impale me.
Gary, hero of the revolution, bashed her on the back of the head with a rock.
There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!” dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent shorted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.
Not very hopefully, I said, “Rattler? Raven?” but while my guides were still awake within me, they gave no clarifying power surge in response. Shapeshifting, dealing with the dead: they could handle those things. Time travel was evidently a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
For the first time since I’d gotten a handle on my shamanic powers, I let the magic go without having healed someone I genuinely wanted to see live. Lugh dragged another blood-bubbly breath and my face crumpled. Failure sucked. “I’m sorry. Something’s already happened here, Lugh. Time’s been changed, and I can’t change it again to heal you. Do you…”
Of course he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t even really have to ask. Suzanne had wiped out Lugh’s predecessor so thoroughly that he’d never existed at all. Someone else had played his role instead, a thought which dropped through me like a lead balloon.
Time had been rewritten. The Morrígan had accepted the Master as, well, her master. I was willing to put money on that not being a coincidence. “Lugh, ah, God, I’m sorry, but how long have the sacrifices been going on? How long have the high kings been marrying the Morrígan?”
“Al…ways. Since…Haw-hee…was slain…by the Morrígan.”
That was about as useful to me as a hole in the head, since I had not a clue what a Hawhee was, but this was not a good time to go into it. I nodded and clutched Lugh’s hand, feeling once more like the useless ingénue. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry, Lugh. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
He smiled, faint bloody expression. “It was supposed to happen…exactly…this way.”
Great. I’d just gotten an I told you so from a dying king. I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when his hand spasmed around mine and determined fear came into his eyes. He surged up half an inch, which under the circumstances was a heroic effort, and whispered, “Warn…Nooda…!”
I had no more idea what a Nooda was than a Hawhee, but I nodded a vigorous, wordless promise, and Lugh, reassured, collapsed silently into death.
Gary stopped to pick up the Morrígan’s sword and throw it several yards away, then came to kneel by me. We sat together silently for what seemed like a long time, but eventually I said, “Who’s Hawhee?” with no expectation of an answer.
“I’m guessin’ a king,” Gary said, which was equal parts obvious and helpful. “Nuada’s one. They called him Nuada of the Silver Hand ’cause his got— Ah, hell, that’s who Hawhee was. It ain’t spelled like it sounds. It’s spelled…” He frowned, clearly calling the name up in memory, then rattled off, “E-o-c-h-a-i-d-h, Eochaidh, yeah. He’s the guy who cut off Nuada’s hand.”
I’d heard of Nuada. He’d made my necklace. It was just, “I thought it was pronounced New-AH-da.”
“Yeah, well, I thought Eochaidh was pronounced Ee-ock-chaye-d-hhh.” He aspirated the last sound like an old wheezing dog and I coughed on his behalf. Gary closed Lugh’s eyes, then cautiously asked, “What happened, Jo? I kinda saw you start to do your thing and then bounce right off a green granite cliff face.”
I blinked up from the dead king in surprise. “You saw that? I mean, you Saw it? Wow. That was…” I trailed off and stared at Lugh again. “That was repercussions. That was Suzanne Quinley, Gary. That was her in the zombie fight. You know the one she obliterated? He came from here. Not quite now, but somewhen around now. Time had to be rewritten around the space he wasn’t anymore.” The language was not well suited to referring to events that had been made to not-happen. I wet my lips and kept going as best I could. “Maybe he was supposed to be Eochaidh’s successor. Maybe he was meant to defeat the Morrígan, or to really marry her, but maybe instead the Master slipped in where he was supposed to be and made her a goddess instead.”
We both looked over at where she still lay sprawled across the grass, a bit of blood leaking through her hair. I said, “Only she isn’t, you know. She’s more than Lugh was, but she’s not like Cernunnos. She’s just very, very powerful.”
“So’re you.”
Somehow that made me feel a little better. I said, “Anyway,” more softly. “Anyway, so this whole era, which I guess means the whole timeline going forward, is all screwed up because of Suzy wiping that zombie out. I couldn’t heal Lugh because there was already too much interference. Something big already got changed. It wouldn’t let me change even more.”
Gary’s gray eyes were big as a lemur’s. “Are you gonna rewrite the whole history of the world, darlin’?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” I sounded very sure of myself, but I had, to a much smaller degree, already been there and done that. “Time tidies things up. The best I can do is close the loop, but I have to do it from our end of time. I can’t set the fix in motion back here.”
“But you can if we get home?”
“I can try.”
“Damn,” Gary said in a low voice. “I mean, damn, Jo.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Yeah, well, don’t get too impressed. I haven’t pulled it off yet. And I still don’t even know how we ended up here, much less how to get us home, never mind how to find Nuada, and I can’t go home without trying to warn him.”
Gary’s expression went funny and he nodded over my shoulder. “We could ask her.”
Alarm crashed into the pit of my stomach and I tried scrabbling for my sword and leaping to my feet at the same time. Neither was wildly successful. I ended up lurching in a half circle with fingertips full of grass.
Fortunately, the woman coming up behind us was unarmed except by radiant beauty. I stole a glance at the unconscious Morrígan and the dead king. They were both still inhumanly attractive. I knew plenty of good-looking people, but these guys made the best of them look like ugly stepsisters. I glanced at the new arrival again, then shot a look at Gary, whose eyebrows had risen. He nodded, and we both gaped at the woman.
She was youthful now when she hadn’t been minutes ago, in the future. She wore a robe identical to the Morrígan’s, only hers was white bound with gold rather than blue with black. She, too, had tattoos banding her upper arms, but in red, not blue. Her hair was coppery and her eyes green, and she had the same kind of gently overflowing aura that had helped tip me off to Lugh’s alienness. Like the Morrígan, she exuded power. Also like the Morrígan, it wasn’t honest-to-God deity-level power. I knew who she was before she spoke.
“Welcome to Tara, Siobhán Walkingstick. I am Brigid.”
Score one for me. With my usual politeness, I said, “Couldn’t you have told me all this from the other end of time?” instead of “Hello.”
Surprised amusement shot her eyebrows toward her hairline. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know what you mean.”
